A car broker who keeps his stock up to date from a chat window

Cartur brokers used cars between Germany and the Czech Republic — sourcing, import, sale — run by one person in Prague. The stock is small but never still: a car is on offer for a few weeks and then gone.

That rules out the usual website answer. Anyone who creates every vehicle as a hand-maintained page ends up maintaining nothing — and a broker who inspects and transports cars is not sitting in a CMS in the evening.

Then there is the language situation of the market: customers speak Czech and Ukrainian, but they buy in the same country, at the same price, in Kč. This is not a two-country setup, it is one market with two languages.

The stock belongs in a database, not in pages. Three tables: the vehicles with their numbers, the descriptions per language, the image gallery with the dimensions the image pipeline needs in order to reserve the space in advance. The mileage is deliberately not in the translation table — the Czech and the Ukrainian listing describe the same car and must not contradict each other about its figures.

A single condition decides visibility: the `published` field. It keeps a half-entered vehicle out of the grid, out of the sitemap and out of the structured data at the same time — instead of three places you can forget one by one.

Czech runs unprefixed at the root, Ukrainian under /uk with the language code uk-CZ rather than plain uk: this is Ukrainian for the Czech Republic, and prices stay in Kč in both languages.

The design follows a tight rule set written down in the repository: no small labels above headings — anything important enough belongs in the heading — and exactly one red action per view. Two red buttons side by side and neither of them reads as the next step any more.

Four areas: home, vehicle stock with a detail page per car, a guide in three chapters (importing from Germany, what it costs, how to inspect a used car before buying) and contact. The guide chapters live as typed data in the code rather than as free text — heading hierarchy, anchors and the article markup are derivable without executing the text.

Search requirements are part of the architecture, not a pass afterwards: canonicals, the hreflang pair across both languages, static rendering, and the vehicle markup as Car and Offer nodes. The list and the detail page read the same node — a car cannot claim one price in the grid and another on its own page.

Listing happens over Telegram. The owner sends the link to a marketplace listing into the chat; the vehicle lands in the database with its data and photos and goes live on release — grid, detail page, sitemap and structured data in one step. This is the part that makes the site maintainable at all: the operator's only task is pasting a link.

Layout without a fixed content width: every section is a field inset from the edge of the screen, and the page scales with the viewport instead of jumping between breakpoints. Headings are set in a narrow condensed face, body text in a quiet grotesque — both with a Cyrillic cut, which here is a requirement rather than a preference: the same components typeset Czech and Ukrainian.